


A Village to Raise a Child

by pyalgroundblz (acidtonguejenny)



Category: Community
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study (of sorts), Coming of Age, F/F, F/M, Gen, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-16
Updated: 2011-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-15 17:37:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/163212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acidtonguejenny/pseuds/pyalgroundblz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annie wasn’t a princess—though, in all honestly, she felt like one. The daughter of a baron, her father reported to the capital concerning crop yield and tax collections; she lived in the largest keep for towns away, and her family kept the most servants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Village to Raise a Child

**Author's Note:**

> A short, PWP (but not in the porny sense, sadly) piece about what the Community characters might be like in a fantasy!medieval!world setting :) Also because, hey, does this fandom have any AUs yet??

Annie wasn’t a princess—though, in all honestly, she felt like one. The daughter of a baron, her father reported to the capital concerning crop yield and tax collections; she lived in the largest keep for towns away, and her family kept the most servants.

Among them was Britta, the petite washerwoman with the sharpest tongue Annie had ever had the misfortune to face, whose blonde hair was kinked from always being tied away from her face, and whose arms and strong hands Annie loved to watch work. Britta grew up the oldest of a family of orphans, working for their bread and caring for her young siblings. She was a no-nonsense woman, with little interest in husbands and romance, and no patience for talk of them. When Annie was silly with love and more confidence than was good for her, Britta stopped her from doing anything truly harmful. In return, Annie tried to find her a man, someone to share the burden of her family’s hungry mouths—and when Britta flatly put a stop to that, to place prospect suitors and apprenticeships in lucky proximity with the washerwoman’s siblings. She managed to have three sisters and one brother happily tucked away and cared for before Britta’s pride could allow her no more.

When Annie was fifteen, still giddy with her perceived maturity and proud of her budding body, she tried to proposition Britta. She managed to steal a pair of kisses before being soaked with dirty washwater like a humping hound. She faced Britta with wide, hurt eyes like only the young and naïve can manage, and was given very little sympathy. “Don’t be a fool, Misses.” And she was taken up in a warm hug as she cried. There were no hard feelings, really. Annie’s bruised pride healed, and though she did not approach Britta again, she still thought of her work-hardened, fine-boned hands on cold nights.

-

There was Jeff, the kitchen master. A tall man who never pulled his blows, and who never once that Annie was aware of hesitated to use what he had to get what he wanted. His flowing tenor and silken tongue to ensure the best quality goods from the merchants, his size to intimidate his staff to compliancy, his looks to persuade the women he pursued. Even when she was young and sneaking into his domain with her brothers to pilfer strawberries and dollops of sweet cream, she blushed when he turned his attention on her. While he was always respectful and sometimes kind, he did not dote on her like much of the staff did. He blistered her backside on more than one occasion upon catching her peering into his ovens, and taught her to fear stirring spoons. But when she was nineteen, and frightened and worried by the consideration of horrid man’s bid for her hand and he found her crying behind his stores of grain and flour, he knelt by her and pulled her into his long arms, and spoke in that chocolate voice until her shaking subsided and her own strength was enough again. When the suit was inevitably refused, she followed him hopefully to his rooms after moonrise, her courage bolstered. He gave her a look that served to make her starkly aware of the differences in years and experience, and a gentle kiss that left her suffused with warmth and grasping for him. Then he very firmly told her _no, Annie_ , and sent her to bed.

-

When Annie was still small and her knees were eternally skinned, she got into a tussle with one of her brothers that ended with them held apart by servants, spitting mad and both dripping mud. Annie’s mother tutted at the state of her dress, and led her by the hand to a wing of the keep she was then unfamiliar with. The room was high-ceilinged and sported tall, glassed windows; the walls were obscured by shelves which supported hundreds of bolts of cloth. Baskets of needles and fat spools occupied the floor space, and in the middle of it all was Shirley: the resident seamstress, and her mother’s confidant. From their first meeting Shirley policed Annie as thoroughly as did her parents, scowling her for rudeness and forever wishing she be a proper lady. It was to her that Annie came with embarrassing recounts, for advice in love and a shoulder to cry on. When Shirley’s sons were born, she set aside her typical tasks and did as much of the sewing and stitching as she was allowed, which usually meant mending sackcloth and on few memorable occasions, tack. But she was permitted to poke at a number of her older, grubbier shifts with needle and thread, and at the end of the experience—both times—left confident that she knew more than before.

-

Her father kept a number of magicians in regular rotation, though never more than two at a time. When Annie was perhaps ten winters there was a particularly colorful man being retained who quickly became infamous for his at times off-putting manner. His spells often wrought chaotic and unanticipated results—flowers appearing in wine glasses at dinner, bursts of bawdy song from the very stone of the keep—and Annie saw him perhaps only a dozen times before he was dismissed, following a furious tirade directed at her father, and mishap involving a suckling pig being suddenly revived on the banquet table. Those few times, the magician Pierce’s coarse way of speaking and lack of humility made her laugh even as she blushed in maidenly dismay, and she was sad to see him go when he did.

She later heard tale of him in another hall, wrecking similar havocking, and was glad for the news.

-

One summer a family from the neighboring province traveled through on their way to the Court for the Solstice celebrations, and stayed in her father’s home for a period of time. It rained hard those days, long and constant. Annie grew accustomed to waking to the sound of it outside her heavy drapes, to drifting away with it’s steady, lulling drone in the background. The company brought with them a jester who was a former slave from the southern lands, and called Abed. His skin was the color of beaten chocolate cream, his eyes burning with an irresistible warmth that drew Annie to him immediately. He loved to talk, and it was from him that she learned to listen. He saw the world differently, though she could never decide if it was because of his past or his own unique way of seeing. Abed taught her to feel the rain instead of listen to it, to taste the sunlight and feast with her eyes. He gave her the first kiss she didn’t take for herself, and they spent nights together in the drafty, empty rooms of the keep’s towers making up stories about the stars. She was sad when he left with the company, and tried to make him promise to return. He would not; instead he told her that he would always remember their weeks of friendship and hesitant love, and held her sweetly.

Annie missed his eyes most.

-

The season after that her father took on a host of new servants, and among their number was a young man her age: Troy. She watched him play games with the other boys in the streets, standing in the middle of a gaggle of giggling, spectating girls, and admired his athleticism, his striking features and the grace and energy of him, his infectious confidence and appealing nature. He collected friends like a child does pebbles. Troy worked in the stables, but mostly away from the animals. He mucked stalls and cared for the gear, and fetched apples and kind murmurs to the horses when the stable master’s back was turned. Annie took to riding more often that fall and the spring after, so as to have a reason to hang about the stables, and became used to the heady scent of fresh hay and nickering horseflesh. She loved to see Troy smile, but the prospect of talking to him froze her tongue in her mouth and the thoughts between her ears. She nursed a secret favor for him for years, until he joined a caravan that passed through and moved on. For months she expected him to return, but he never did, and she eventually stopped looking for him.

-

Once a charming physician came through, smiling brilliantly despite his ragged, travel-worn robes and hungry appearance. He treated her father for an infected finger, and was rewarded with food and bed for as long as he wanted them. He stayed for only three days, before some enormous sense of humility demanded he leave. However, that short time was long even to win him the hearts of half of the women in the keep and surrounding village--to such a degree of devotion that should he had asked, Annie thought that most of them would have surely departed with him. It was also time enough for Jeff to grow to despise the man fiercely; he refused to cook for his meals, and stepped back from his kitchen with a dramatic and pot-tossing flourish; his staffed scurried to fill the physician’s every hinted craving with such speed they tripped over themselves.

Jeff was short with them all for a week afterwards, disappointed that in their enamored state the fear he could inspire in them was not enough to control them.

Annie followed close with her group of peers during the doctor’s stay, for at least one of them was forever coming up with some unbearable hurt and sore need for a medic’s eye. They gossiped restlessly about his looks and his lovelife and his kind, sunshiny smile, and a gloom settled over them when he departed.

-

When Annie finally married and left the keep behind, she dearly regretted to leave the servants—such a colorful cast of people she did not expect to meet again, though for her children’s sake, she was hopeful.


End file.
